Iocane powder

Freedom of expression

The next image has made a big splash today in Spain:

It’s a satire about our Prince and Princess being extremely happy about the new 2500 euro per newborn the government has announced, because it will be the closest thing to a real salary/job they’ll ever get. The magazine where it’s been published has been censured and retired from the market, charged with “offenses to the Crown”.

I find the mere concept of actually having a King in the 21st century ludicrous, being of the opinion that the system, even being as benign as it is, should be simply dismantled to enlarge the scope of human freedom. What is totally unacceptable is that the existence of the Crown is in fact limiting one of the fundamental rights of every person, freedom of expression. I sincerely hope this will trigger a massive reaction in the Spanish society that will finally put the Royal family where it belongs: the exile.

Epiphany + Webkit

As jdub would say: crack now, analysis later.

aoeui: the case for dvorak

It’s been one week now since I switched to the dvorak layout, the main reasons for it being a preemptive strike on RSI and the desire of going through a formal touch typing training without the vices of many years of crappy qwertying. It’s been easily one of the most mentally exhausting experiences in my life, and the shock of the first couple of days is something worth noting: when you type at less than 10 words per minute using your computer becomes a very alienating activity, and the tools that were previously your second home become total strangers (ahem, emacs).

Of course I still write like crap (maybe around 25-30 wpm if you trust gtypist), but I can already see how this layout was actually designed to ease writing (in english). The downside is that some well known keyboard interactions are qwerty-centric, like Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Ctrl-X, and some emacs key chords feel more forced than the usual. Another problem is that my hacking productivity went to hell temporarily, but I still have hopes of doing something interesting during GUADEC with the Epiphany and maemo guys among others (btw, already in Birmingham: horrible flight, and they lost the luggage of almost all the nokians, me included. Impressive).

Siberian reinforcements

After a very productive GTK+ Meeting yesterday I’ve voluntereed to resurrect the Weekly Bug Reports (like this) with the aim of improving the rotting patch scenario of gtk+’s bugzilla. So, if you have GTK+ patches waiting for review in bugzilla, you are not in my preliminary list (don’t panic, I’m planning to use bugzilla for this) and would like to see this changing, send me an email to xan TA gnome TOD org.

git-send-bugzilla is amazing, check it out if you are not using it yet.

Finally, as seen on Acts of Volition:

Breaking News

Tommi is now officially one of the few and proud GtkMenu experts (you touch it you own it). Send your condolence letters and GtkMenu questions to:

Origami Rose

Finally spent some time adding the search functionality for gtk-look.el, you can check my ugly hack here (the new function is gtk-lookup-search-symbol). Used the O’Reilly book Writing GNU Emacs Extensions as an introduction to the subject, and had lots of fun with it. When Emacs switches to a modern lisp in 2025 I bet it will be a lot more fun

Ninja master Daniel Piedra^WStone instructed me about the evils of falling back to fbCompositeGeneral in the X fb code. Indeed the sucker appears quite a lot in my powerpc oprofile logs. One uninformed wild guess is that the lack of something like fbaltivec.c is not helping here. No good drivers + exotic architecture really buys you all the tickets for the most slow rendering path.

Last but not least, the Epiphany SoC application by Imran Patel to merge History and Bookmarks under a new backend was accepted! If it succeeds it should improve the Epihany user experience and allow other parts of the desktop to easily access that data.

PS: the nice origami rose was done by my girlfriend Sandra. I tried to do some stuff with her but the results won’t be shown to protect the innocent bystander.

What? A coke is a coke

Sent a proposal to improve the situation for GTK+ wannabe-maintainers. Didn’t get much feedback, but we’ll probably meet again this thursday from 18:00 UTC+2 at #gtk-love/irc.gimp.org. Would be specially interested in getting volunteers to get the “GTK+ hackers guide” started (A brief summary of my proposal is: 1) Gather a GTK+ love bug list with easy bugs for beginners. Something like this but hopefully using bugzilla and with the maintainers support. 2) Create a short guide with the most basic concepts a GTK+ hacker should understand thoroughly explained. Hopefully it’d be mostly a matter of collecting, updating and expanding the already available and scattered docs).

Ranted with fellow Nokian and emacs user Dirk Jan (there’s no need to panic, it’s only dutch) about how nice would it be to get the devhelp functionality from within emacs. Well, this morning he sent me this, which I’m already loving. It’s only missing search to be completely perfect (Tempted to get my hands dirty with elisp and just do it).

PS: the title is the canonical answer a waiter from Brussels will give you if you ask for a “big coke”.

Distro!

svu: same situation here. This latest ESR chapter is the last nail in the coffin for me though (”ha ha only serious”), I’m now all set to install Fedora 7 on my powerbook when it’s released. I actually considered moving to Fedora 5 one year ago, but the default install was so broken (X hangs, the updater going totally bonkers eating all my RAM, etc) that I went back crying to Ubuntu. This time I think I’ll stick to it and report all the problems I have like a good boy.

When I started using Linux 9 years ago, I think I basically thought ESR was a pretty cool guy. I wonder if the radically different opinion I have of him now means that he has changed a lot, that I’ve changed a lot, or actually both.

PS: gotta love the midget sex spam I get on the blog since I’m syndicated on the planet.

Hello Planet!

Hi there, this should be my first post in Planet GNOME.

My name is Xan López and I’m a spanish/galician hacker. Last september I joined Nokia/OSSO to help overloaded tommi with all-things GTK+ inside Maemo. These days I’m mostly trying to get to know the inner workings of GTK+ and trying to send some useful contributions to the Epiphany project again. Speaking of which…

This morning I spent some more time working on the infamous (at least for Ephy users) bug 318459, which prevented GtkEntryCompletion users from editing in-place the matches in the popup. I finished some remaining bits and hacked the ephy part of the equation here. Mixing everything together should give a much more pleasant Epiphany for everyone. Here’s a small demo of the thing working.

Thanks to Fer I got an amazing plane ticket offer and I will fly with my girlfriend to Japan in September. Any Japanese GNOME hacker wants to have a nice meeting somewhere in the country? I’ll exchange unsubstantial geeky chit-chat for first-hand info on the best places to visit 日本へ行きましょう!

Performance Measurement (IV)

In the past couple of weeks the pango/cairo performance world domination has proceeded as planned. Cutting down the glyph extents computation per expose, less floating point “burning” in cairo, optimizing the xrender usage for glyph rendering, further tesselator improvements (yet to be commited), etc. Special mention goes to the heroic Behdad, who is rocking so hard someone should send him a 770 or something. Wait, we already did. Ok, then someone should offer to have his babies. Wait! Someone already did!. Well, if he ever decides to run for Benevolent Dictator of the World, you already know the person to vote for.

The latest torturer results:

gtk2-6 is GTK+ 2.6.10, gtk2-10xft is GTK+ 2.10.6 with an ugly patch to use libXft for font rendering. cairo124 is GTK+ 2.10.6 with cairo 1.2.4 (no, really) and pango 1.14. “oldglyph” is using cairo 1.3.6 and pango HEAD, and “newglyph” is cairo 1.3.6 + behdad’s glyph optimization patch and pango HEAD. The GtkLabel column is especially relevant for us because we can finally forget about using the ugly xft+gtk2.10 patch. I have some numbers from timetext in a mail to the cairo list.

That’s all for now, further updates as we receive them.